Dan Berkenstock is an entrepreneur and engineer from Chicago, IL with a healthy respect for the risks & rewards of doing business in space. He is also fascinated by scalable and novel data streams thatrevolutionize the ways that consumers, businesses, and governments make decisions in their day-to-day lives.

As a Co-Founder and the Executive Vice President & Chief Product Officer of Skybox Imaging, Berkenstock leads the vision, implementation, and delivery of revolutionary information products & services derived from timely satellite imagery. Previously, he was the founding CEO of Skybox. In this role he led the company from inception: raising $21M in equity financing from leading silicon valley venture capitalists, building the team to 50, obtaining the company's NOAA operating license, and overseeing the design & successful critical design review of SkySat-1.

Berkenstock is currently on leave from the Ph.D. program in Aeronautics & Astronautics at Stanford University, where he also received his masters degree. Prior to co-founding Skybox, he researched optimal designmethods for spacecraft in the Advanced Supercomputing Division of NASA's Ames Research Center. Berkenstock has also worked as a counterproliferation analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,developing methods to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Berkenstock has worked at several early stage startup companies and served as a cooperative education student for NASA at Johnson Space Center. At JSC, Dan was a certified scuba diver at NASA's NeutralBuoyancy Laboratory where he assisted in training astronauts for extravehicular activities. Dan has supported two space shuttle missions as an assistant to the Assembly Checkout Office in Mission Control,performed computational analysis on the space shuttle, and supported T-38 trainer jet activities at Ellington Field.

"If you want to start a company, really think about what you want your life to be like for the next five years," says Dan Berkenstock, co-founder of Skybox Imaging. According to Berkenstock, and fellow co-founder Julian Mann, this means thoughtfully considering how big an opportunity you are willing to pursue and how much control you are willing to share.

Co-Founder Dan Berkenstock describes the intoxicating early days of incorporating Skybox Imaging after finishing a technology venture formation course at Stanford. Berkenstock relates the maddening pace of making pitches and working to meet possible investors, before eventually securing initial funding.

The co-founders of Skybox Imaging, Dan Berkenstock, Julian Mann, John Fenwick and Ching-Yu Hu, realized early on they had one thing in common: they don't take no for an answer. Here the team of Stanford alumni explain their passion to disrupt the satellite imaging industry and share engaging tales of launching their unique venture.

The co-founders of Skybox Imaging, Dan Berkenstock, Julian Mann, John Fenwick and Ching-Yu Hu, realized early on they had one thing in common: they don't take no for an answer. Here the team of Stanford alumni explain their passion to disrupt the satellite imaging industry and share engaging tales of launching their unique venture.